Are you excited enough about commercial exploration to sponsor a spaceflight company?

Sure there are concerns about the sustainability of what NASA is doing, but there’s a ton going on in the commercial market. Not only are private companies like Virgin Galactic opening space up to the common (but rich) man, they’re promising to fly humans back beyond low-Earth orbit for the first time in four decades.

(Golden Spike)

And people are making their excitement known.

Last December a company called Golden Spike announced a plan to send two-person missions to the surface of the moon by 2020 for about $1.5 billion a flight.

Originally the company planned to begin a marketing campaign in around 2015 to allow the public to participate in the process of developing, planning and experiencing such a flight.

“After the announcement we expected a pulse of interest,” the company’s founder, Alan Stern, told me. “But we had people knocking down our door down from the beginning and it didn’t die off. We realized we’ve really got something here and we don’t want to keep turning people away, so we we decided to accelerate those promotional activities.”

So, as the leading edge of its efforts to engage the public, Golden Spike has launched an Indiegogo fundraising campaign. It’s simply an outlet for people who want to get the human race flying back to the moon a way to show their support and get a few token perks in return.

Obviously giving money to a private company just for the purpose of supporting spaceflight isn’t for everyone. But such ideas have worked before — public subscribers funded many of the early expeditions that explored the Arctic and Antarctic areas of the planet.

And Stern’s not trying to reach everyone, anyway.

“What’s different now compared to what we had during the first 50 years of human spaceflight is that with NASA’s limited resources they could only do one thing at a time. And with the government model you had to have a consensus on what that one thing is. In the commercial world if I can capture 3 percent of the American population’s interest, that’s a huge market.”

So if you think this is a dumb idea, Stern doesn’t care. He knows there are many others out there who do care about exploration.

And he’s giving them a chance to put their money where their mouth is.